Here’s Looking at You: The ART of Interrogation

What happens when we stop peering at and investigating art and instead allow a particular work of art to look at, or indeed, interrogate us?

This can be for many of us both a rewarding and unsettling experience.

The abiding value and challenge of great art is that through its many different forms, art has the ability to decentre, deconstruct and even denounce our stereotypical self-centred and self-absorbed ways of looking at the world and ourselves.

During this day we will allow the work of Van Gogh, Turner, Constable, Palmer and other examples of more modern art to ask fundamental questions about who we are as human persons and how we conceive of our sense of place in the world around us.

Course Details

Stephen Girling graduated with a MA in Theology, Imagination and Culture in 2013. Having spent 23 years in three different contexts as a parish priest, Stephen is currently the missioner at Bath Abbey. He is intrigued about what we can learn from God through holy encounter. The icon-like portraits by Van Gogh were the subject of his MA dissertation and he will be drawing on these to stimulate our thinking and conversations; Judith Egar is a recent graduate in Theology, Imagination and Culture. For some years she combined a career in law with part-time parish ministry in the diocese of Chichester. She has a particular interest in literature and the visual arts as stimuli for theological reflection. Her MA dissertation explored the theology of place through the work of John Constable, JMW Turner and Samuel Palmer.